The Silence of Jesus

When false witnesses testified against our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, he said nothing; and when unfounded charges were brought against him, he gave no answer. He judged that his whole life and conduct among the Jews refuted the false testimony better than any answer could, and met the accusations better than any formal defense. And I do not know, my devout Ambrosius, why you wanted me to write a reply to the false charges Celsus brings against the Christians, and to the accusations he makes in his book against the faith of the churches — as though the facts themselves were not a plain refutation, and the teaching not a better answer than anything written, since it both disposes of the false statements and leaves the accusations no credit and no force.

As for our Lord’s silence when false witness was borne against him, it is enough for now to quote Matthew; Mark reports the same thing. Matthew’s words are these. The high priest and the council looked for false testimony against Jesus so that they could put him to death, and they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last two false witnesses came forward and said, “This man said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and build it up after three days.’” And the high priest stood up and said to him, “Do you have no answer to what these men testify against you?” But Jesus kept silent.

And that he gave no answer when he was falsely accused — this is the account. Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor questioned him: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus said to him, “You say so.” And when he was accused by the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing. Then Pilate said to him, “Do you not hear how many things they are testifying against you?” And he gave him no answer, not to a single charge, so that the governor was greatly astonished.

It surprised even men of ordinary intelligence. Here was a man accused and attacked by false testimony, who was able to defend himself and to show that he was guilty of none of the charges; who could have listed the praiseworthy acts of his own life and the miracles he had done by God’s power, and so given the judge grounds for a more honorable verdict. He did none of it. He refused, and in the greatness of his nature he looked down on his accusers. That the judge would have released him without hesitation if he had offered a defense is clear from what is recorded of him, when he said, “Which of the two do you want me to release to you — Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” and from what the Scripture adds: “For he knew that they had handed him over out of envy.”

But Jesus is attacked by false witnesses at all times, and as long as wickedness remains in the world he is always open to accusation. Even now he keeps silent about it and makes no answer out loud. He places his defense in the lives of his genuine disciples, which are testimony of the highest order — testimony that rises above all false witness and refutes and overturns every unfounded accusation and charge.

So I will venture to say that this defense you are asking me to compose will actually weaken the defense that rests on facts, and weaken that power of Jesus which is plain to anyone not wholly without perception. Still, so as not to look unwilling to do the work you have laid on me, I have tried as best I could to set down, against each of Celsus’s statements, whatever seemed to me to refute it — though his arguments have no power to shake the faith of anyone who really believes.

And God forbid that anyone should be found who, having once shared in such a love of God as was shown in Christ Jesus, could be shaken from his purpose by arguments from Celsus or from anyone like him. When Paul listed the countless things that ordinarily separate people from the love of Christ and from the love of God in Christ Jesus — all of which the love in him rose above — he did not put argument among the grounds of separation. Notice what he says first: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Trouble, or hardship, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? As it is written: ‘For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.’ No — in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” And then, setting out a second list of causes that naturally tend to separate people who are not firmly grounded in their religion, he says: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Now it is right that we should feel lifted up because afflictions, and the other causes Paul lists, do not separate us from Christ. It is not right to say the same of Paul and the other apostles, or of anyone like them: they were far above such things when they said, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us,” which is a stronger claim than that they are simply conquerors. But if it is proper for apostles to feel lifted up at not being separated from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord, they will feel it because neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor any of the rest, can separate them from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And so I do not congratulate the believer in Christ whose faith can be shaken by Celsus — a man who no longer shares the common life of the living, but died long ago — or by any argument that merely sounds plausible. I do not know where to rank a person who needs arguments written in books, answering Celsus’s charges against the Christians, to keep him from being shaken in his faith and to steady him in it. But since among the many who are counted believers there might be some whose faith the writings of Celsus would shake and overthrow, and who could be kept safe by a reply that refutes his statements and sets out the truth, we have thought it right to do as you asked and to answer the book you sent us — a book which I do not think anyone even a little advanced in philosophy will allow to be called a True Discourse, the name Celsus gave it.

Paul saw that there are things in Greek philosophy not to be lightly dismissed, things that look convincing to most people but present falsehood as truth, and about them he says: “See that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, following human tradition, following the elements of the world, and not following Christ.” And because there was a certain grandeur in the words of the world’s wisdom, he said that the philosophers’ words were “according to the elements of the world.”

No sensible person, though, would say that Celsus’s words were “according to the elements of the world.” Words that had some element of deceit in them the apostle called “empty deceit,” probably to distinguish them from a deceit that was not empty; and the prophet Jeremiah noticed this and dared to say to God, “Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I am, and you have prevailed.” But in Celsus’s language there seems to me to be no deceit at all, not even the empty kind — the kind found in the language of men who founded schools of philosophy and had no ordinary gift for that work. Just as no one would call every chance mistake in a geometrical proof a deliberately drawn false figure, or write one out for the sake of the exercise such things give, so the opinions that deserve to be called “empty deceit” and “human tradition” and “according to the elements of the world” must have some resemblance to the views of the men who founded the philosophical schools — if those titles are to be applied to them properly.

After carrying this work as far as the place where Celsus brings in a Jew arguing with Jesus, I decided to put this preface at the front, so that a reader of my reply would meet it first and see that the book was not written for thorough believers, but for people who are either wholly unacquainted with the faith of Christians or, as the apostle calls them, “weak in the faith” — the ones he means when he says, “Welcome the person who is weak in the faith.”

This preface must also be my excuse for beginning the answer to Celsus on one plan and carrying it on by another. My first intention was to state his principal objections, then briefly the answers made to them, and after that to work the whole discussion up into a connected body. But circumstances themselves suggested that I should be sparing with my time, and that, content with what I had already said at the start, I should from there on grapple as closely as I could with Celsus’s charges. So I have to ask for indulgence over the portions that follow the preface, near the beginning of the book. And if the stronger arguments that come later do not impress you, then, asking the same indulgence for those as well, I refer you — if you still want a reasoned solution to Celsus’s objections — to men wiser than I am, who are able by words and by books to overthrow the charges he brings against us. But better than any of these is the man who, even when he meets the work of Celsus, needs no answer to it at all, and despises the whole of it, since every believer in Christ despises it, and rightly, through the Spirit that is in him.

The first point Celsus brings forward, in his wish to discredit Christianity, is that Christians make secret compacts with one another, contrary to what is established. He says: “Some compacts are open — the ones made in accordance with the laws — and others are hidden, the ones carried out contrary to what is established.” And he wants to bring into disrepute what is called the love the Christians have for one another, as though it arose out of their common danger and had more force than any oath. [j]

Well, since he keeps harping on the common law and says that the compacts of the Christians violate it, this must be said in reply. Suppose a man found himself among Scythians, whose laws are lawless, and had no chance of getting away but was forced to live among them. He would be right, for the sake of the law of truth — which to the Scythians would be plain lawbreaking — to make compacts with people who thought as he did, contrary to what the Scythians had established. In the same way, if truth is to be the judge, the laws of the nations about cult statues and a godless worship of many gods are Scythian laws, and more godless than Scythian, if anything is.

So it is not unreasonable to make compacts contrary to what is established, when they are made for the sake of the truth. Just as men would be doing well to make a secret compact to kill a tyrant who had seized control of their city, so too Christians, tyrannized over by the one they call the devil and by falsehood, make compacts contrary to what the devil has established, against the devil, and for the salvation of others — as many others as they can persuade to revolt from a law that is, so to speak, Scythian and tyrannical.

Next he says that the teaching is barbarian in its origin — meaning Judaism, on which Christianity depends. And fair-mindedly he does not reproach the message for its barbarian beginning; he even credits barbarians with being competent to discover such teachings. But he adds that Greeks are better at judging what the barbarians discovered, at confirming it, and at practicing it toward virtue. [n]

So out of what he himself says we get this, as a defense of what stands in Christianity and is true. If a man came to the message from Greek teachings and Greek schooling, he would not only judge its doctrines true; by practicing them he would establish them, and whatever seemed to be missing, judged by Greek standards of proof, he would supply, and so confirm the truth of Christianity.

There is more to say. The message has a proof of its own, more divine than the Greek proof that comes from dialectic. The apostle names this more divine kind a demonstration “of the Spirit and of power” — of the Spirit, because of the prophecies, which are enough to produce faith in anyone who reads them, especially in what concerns Christ; and of power, because of the astonishing acts of power, which must be shown to have happened. They must be shown on many other grounds, and on this one, that traces of them are still preserved among people who live according to what the message intends.

After this, Celsus speaks of the Christians teaching and practicing what they like in secret, and says they do it to some purpose, since it lets them push off the death sentence hanging over them. He compares their danger with the dangers that came on men like Socrates for the sake of philosophy — and here he might have mentioned Pythagoras as well, and other philosophers. [q]

Our answer is this. In Socrates’ case the Athenians regretted it at once, and no bitterness about him stayed with them; the same is true of Pythagoras. His followers, at any rate, kept their schools going for a long time in the part of Italy called Magna Graecia. But in the case of the Christians, the Roman Senate, the emperors of the day, the armies, the peoples of the cities, and the relatives of those who came to believe all made war on the message. They would have stopped it, and it would have been beaten by so large a conspiracy, if it had not risen above them and overtopped them by the power of God — so that in the end it defeated the whole world that was conspiring against it.

Let us look also at how he thinks to discredit the ethical part of philosophy, on the ground that we hold it in common with the other philosophers and that it is no august or new teaching. The answer is this. For people who maintain that God judges justly, the punishment of sins would be ruled out altogether if all of us did not already have, by the notions common to everyone, a sound preconception of the ethical part. [r]

So it is no wonder that the same God has sown into the souls of all people the very things he taught through the prophets and through the Savior. His purpose was that at the divine judgment every person should be without excuse, having the intent of the law written on his own heart. The word hinted at this in what the Greeks take for a myth, when it presented God as writing the commands with his own finger and giving them to Moses — the commands that were shattered by the wickedness of the men who made the calf, as though, so to speak, a flood of sin had washed over them. But God wrote a second time and gave them again, after Moses had cut the stones; it is as if the prophetic word, after that first sin, were making the soul ready for a second writing from God.

When he sets out the rules about idols as belonging particularly to those who follow the message, Celsus actually helps to establish them. He says the Christians will not regard hand-made things as gods, on the ground that it is not reasonable to suppose that images produced by the meanest craftsmen — men of bad character, and in many cases the work of unjust men besides — could be gods. [w]

Then, wanting to show that this is a common opinion and not something Christianity discovered first, he sets out a saying of Heraclitus: “People who approach lifeless things as if they were gods behave like a man gossiping with the houses.” About this, then, we have to say that just as with the rest of ethics, notions were sown into people, and out of those notions Heraclitus — and any other Greek or barbarian — could think this out and establish it. Celsus himself reports that the Persians held the same view, citing Herodotus as his authority.

We can add Zeno of Citium, who says in his Republic: “There will be no need to build temples. Nothing should be considered sacred, or of much value, or holy, when it is the work of builders and manual workers.” It is clear, then, that about this teaching too, what ought to be done has been written in people’s hearts in God’s own lettering.